This week in PAL we looked in detail at CSS. We ran over the basics with a CSS document structure, in particular the three key areas:
We talked about the methods which you can use to include CSS documents.
To conclude we held a quick test on CSS selectors. The questions and answers are included in the attached PowerPoint.
If you are running on O2 or another network that uses O2′s infrastructure (namely Tesco Mobile and giffgaff), it is likely that your mobile phone number has been transmitted to every website you have visited over the past 15 days. The Information Commissioner’s Office said it is considering whether to investigate further, although a spokesman said there was no immediate breach of the Data Protection Act. This is because the DPA does not class mobile phone numbers as personally identifiable information.
However, if you have received telemarketing text messages or calls over the last 15 days that you believe may have been caused by your mobile phone number being released, there may be grounds on which you can either cancel your contract or claim compensation.
NB: Please do not take this advice as a legal footing, I am not a lawyer. Please check with your solicitor to see if you have valid legal grounds before entering a dispute with O2.
There is an European Union directive, 2002/58/EC, that instructs under Article 13 “Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that, free of charge, unsolicited communications for purposes of direct marketing… are not allowed either without the consent of the subscribers concerned or in respect of subscribers who do not wish to receive these communications…”
By “communications,” this implies emails, text (SMS) messages and telephone calls. This directive means that there should be some form of legal context within the Data Protection Act on which you can claim compensation, based on what the UK government did to implement this directive. If you manage to find the clause in the DPA which covers this, please let me know.
I’m building an application for my “Data, Schemas & Applications” module at university, which manipulates data from Google to display the weather for given locations. Google’s weather API is fairly simple to understand, and is run through a REST base service and does not require the use of an API key.
You can use PHP to download a copy of the weather data for your chosen city, and subsequently process it to output the weather in whatever way you choose. Prakash has provided a function which can be used on the University campus for loading files through the proxy. It looks like the following:
We later use that function to get a SimpleXML instance of the Google Weather XML file. However, there’s an issue with using Google’s API and PHP’s SimpleXML class, and that is one of character encodings. Every text file generated by computers uses some kind of character encoding, and it’s used by computers to interpret what certain bytes should be rendered as. Common character sets used in everyday situations include:
As it turns out, Google API returns XML documents encoded in an encoding called “GB_18030,” which is a Chinese government standard, and includes a lot of Latin characters (commonly used in English, French, Italian and other European languages), as well as Chinese, Japanese and other east-Asian characters, thereby allowing the API to work in those countries.
However, PHP’s SimpleXML class expects us to load a file in UTF-8. Because of that, we need to convert our returned XML file into UTF-8; which, as it turns out, is fairly simple.
PHP has a module called “iconv.” This module is able to convert an object or a string’s character encoding. Through the following code we can easily switch the character encoding of Google’s XML file to UTF-8.
I hope this explains the issue and the solution in as simple form as possible. However, if you have any questions on how this works, please post them in the comments section below.
This week in PAL, after a quick overview of what the term details, we looked (in detail) at semester 2′s assignment brief. The assignment is mostly about creating a website to your own drawn-up specifications. Luckily you’re able to base it on an interesting band, whereas I was stuck with David Bowie last year.
Attached files:
Well, over recent months I’ve noticed that the WordPress theme I hastily made to fit the general style of my site hasn’t really worked. Therefore, since I really want to get back into blogging properly, and I haven’t the time (what with coursework assignments and the hunt for a placement) to build a new WordPress theme, I’ve reverted to the default one until the summer.
After all, surely the blog should be a method of communication more than a demonstration of my WordPress theme building skills (which is something I want to learn). The content I post is far more valuable than the PHP, HTML and CSS that forms the backbone of the design.
To conclude, please forgive me for allowing the blog to differ from the rest of my website, but I guarantee the increase in posts will be worth it.